Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  He’s about to turn away when she reaches out and presses a hand to his cheek.

  “Breathe.”

  For a moment, he has no idea what she’s talking about.

  “Smell that? It’s elderberry.”

  And suddenly he smells it in the humid air, emanating from the shrubs behind: as if her naming the scent is the key that unlocks his knowing it. And with this simple recognition comes an equally simple, and rather vague, memory of his mother baking an elderberry pie. He can’t remember the year, or the pie getting finished, or eating it, or the taste, or whether life was good then or more like it is now; just his mother in the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up, flour dusting her forearms to her elbows, while he sits doing his homework at the kitchen table, a radio playing low.

  And over the river a sudden breeze pinches the water’s black skin into intricate flashing scales, like tiny silver minnows leaping in the holographic night—until, as quickly as it’s risen, the breeze dies and the scales are swallowed back into the smooth oil-black liquid, where all is moving as well as still.

  He places his hand over Emma’s hand, against his face.

  There is still the possibility that she knows him better than he knows himself, can read him without words. Who else, if not her? They who were there by chance when the world went wrong. He doesn’t need to own or claim her, only to hold on to the fact of her. To stand with her on the scented bank of the river, naming the things that can still be named, touching her hand, till the night finally runs out of darkness.

  RUTH

  FOR MORE THAN TEN MINUTES as she finishes her bath, Dwight’s deep regular breathing is the only sound coming from the next room. Not even the drain’s centrifugal rant manages to interrupt his descent into the depths of a calmer place where, for minutes or hours, he might hope to inhabit someone who is not himself. Almost like old times.

  She stands in the bathroom rubbing moisturizer on her body—everywhere but on her breasts, which, just these past few days, she’s turned superstitious about touching. She puts on her robe and turbans her hair with a towel. On the robe are forget-me-nots, season-less and charming, giving the impression, in a certain light, if one rules out a host of other factors, that she is every age she’s ever been.

  Escaping the mirror, she walks into the next room.

  He’s rolled onto his side, toward the middle of the bed. On the pillow by his chin there’s a liver-colored patch of dried blood and a larger absorbed blot of darkened cotton where he’s drooled in his sleep. His bottom lip looks swollen and painful.

  She stands watching him. To see him sleeping on this bed again is to see a part of herself that’s never quite woken up. A wave of feeling for that young woman moves her. A part of her is animal, too; neither of them is static. Under his eyelids and rough stubbled cheeks now, the pale, surprisingly hairless skin at his wrists, the powerful twitching shoulders, Pyrrhic battles are still being fought: even in repose, his muscles quiver and rage at invisible enemies, who will never be beaten.

  The difference, she is starting to believe despite her instincts, is that he’s finally learning to live with his hands gripping only his own throat. The only person he dreams of hurting now is himself.

  With delicate, almost loving concentration, she unlaces his shoes and pulls them off. She covers him from the waist down with the quilt sewn in the Crown of Thorns pattern that’s come down from her mother’s mother. Like a baby blanket obsessively clutched for too many years, it has turned ragged at the edges and is slowly disintegrating. She covers him with it anyway. And then she turns off the lights and leaves him to sleep in the once familiar darkness.

  DWIGHT

  I WAKE IN MY MARRIAGE BED. It’s deep night or early morning and I find a lamp on the bedside table and switch it on. A quilt is draped across my legs. My shoes have been removed. My mouth aches, and the lower half of my jaw. I turn my head and see an ugly rust-colored smudge where my cut lip’s been pressing against the white pillow while I’ve been sleeping.

  Ruth, though not physically present, is all over this room: her needlepoint throw draped over a chair; her TV on a mahogany chest of drawers come down to her from her Aunt Marlene; her ivory bra hanging on the closet doorknob; her shoes with the heels worn down along the inside edge; her silver tray holding two small bottles of lavender water.

  Eau-de-vie, I remember calling it once, till Ruth shook her head and with a sly grin said, “I think that’s the liqueur you’re talking about.”

  We conceived Sam here. His bassinet stood in the corner by the window so he could watch the stars twinkling up in the blue-black sky if he felt the urge to see other worlds, which he often did. He slept and dreamed under an airplane mobile I put together from a kit.

  After a while, I shuffle into the bathroom. Where, hours after the fact, the air still smells of Ruth’s bubble bath—like her, bracing rather than flowery. The scent of a morning walk along a Cape beach in summer, the tide out and the seaweed left to dry on the yellow sand, the sand yellow like my wife’s and son’s hair, on a Fourth of July weekend of the last perfect year, the three of us shot from behind in an endless, vanishing wide shot.

  I sit on the edge of the bathtub, breathing it all in. Then, like the animal I am, I get up and stand for a minute pissing into the toilet. And go to the sink and stare into the bright clear mirror at my fifty-year-old face. The lower lip fat now with blood, a small blue star blooming in its corner.

  EMMA

  BACK HOME, alone in bed, the warmth of Sam’s hand remains on hers. This is actual, she believes. And awake as she’s ever been, with an hour or two left of the night, she begins to study the warmth under the microscope of her feeling. Gradually she twists the dial, increases the magnification. Looking at the kind of warmth it might be, its source, its conceivable longevity. What it might signify, what it might not. If there might be answers in it as well as questions. Whether it’s even sexual, after all, despite her longings and his. Or whether the sexual part might in fact be more remembered than real, a kind of shared aura trailing them from the past, a reflection less of where they’re headed than of where they’ve been.

  It’s morning and time for work before the truth comes down on her in all its sadness and possibility: that she loves Sam Arno not, as she has long assumed, with the full heat of her passion but instead like a brother. And it’s for this that she knows she will forgive him anything.

  SAM

  IT’S THE WALL OF HIS ROOM he sees when he opens his eyes in the morning, but it’s not the wall he feels.

  He doesn’t move. He lies there, staring at the wall, an odd, probing warmth on his back.

  In the dream, what there was of it, his mother’s house was a different color, dark green. No reason. There was a rocking chair on the porch. He cannot in fact recall such a chair. But he can recall the thin dark-haired boy who sits on it, rocking slowly, just the tips of his black sneakers touching the floorboards (and only on the downward rock), his elegant, precociously musical hands resting secretively, maybe haughtily, atop the black violin case in his lap.

  He walks past this boy. They do not acknowledge each other. He enters his house, climbs the stairs, and goes to his room.

  The Red Sox memorabilia is gone. No, it’s not the Yankees—this isn’t a horror movie—it’s merely nothing. Bare white walls. Another pointless incongruity. It’s still not registered on him yet, the identity of the thin dark-haired boy downstairs, all four feet of him. The boy who sits rocking on the chair that was never there. The boy who—he can hear it now, rising from the porch and entering his open window—is humming to himself, yes humming, in a soft high voice, as if to unburden himself of his life, and at the same time to tell the world a story: the voice burnished as in church, practiced and choral, with something like a soul in it.

  It’s the music Sam can’t get rid of. That keeps coming back to him like a curse, here and here and here and here, whenever it feels like it. As if he was the one who’d gone and killed everythi
ng.

  DWIGHT

  IT WAS A CLEAR NIGHT, but it’s a gray morning. What I can see of it, anyway, pressing dully around the drawn shades in Sam’s bedroom.

  I’ve turned his desk chair around so I can sit observing the twin bed, cornered against two walls, where he lies facing away from me on his side, one knee raised almost to his chest as if he’s hurdling some obstacle in his sleep. On the floor, his clothes are dropped in no special order. I notice some caked dirt on his boots and the knees of his jeans—he was out in a field somewhere, I guess, or down by the river.

  I sit watching him, the throaty, priestlike calls of mourning doves coming in through the partially open window.

  At some point, he rolls over and blinks at me. He doesn’t seem surprised by my presence, and I have the vague feeling that he’s been awake for a while already, just lying there, hiding in plain sight. We stare at each other, until I turn my visible attention to the computer sitting on his desk, as if it has something important to tell me. Next to it is a speckled school-composition notebook, and near that, on the floor, Sam’s baseball glove, an expensive Mizuno, with a fresh white ball still caught in the webbing, an illegible autograph scrawled on the ball’s exposed face, between the sewn red seams.

  Across the room, the door to his closet stands open. Up on the top shelf, jutting out starkly amid a riot of old clothes and sports equipment, is a trumpet case of hard black plastic.

  “Ever play the horn anymore?”

  He shakes his head. Slowly he raises himself to a sitting position and leans back against the tongue-in-groove wall: I can see the tic-tac-toe ridges in his abdominals smooth out as the angle of his torso widens. There is a tear at the left hip of his blue boxer shorts. His muscled chest is practically hairless, and the bruises he had when he arrived at my house in California have faded away to nothing.

  “I wasn’t any good,” he says, after a while.

  “You always sounded pretty good to me.”

  “You probably weren’t the best judge.”

  “No,” I agree.

  We fall silent. Sam begins picking at the bedspread with his long fingers. And merely to do something and maybe, against tall odds, to lighten the general atmosphere, I get up and move to the window and raise the white shade. And, unexpectedly, the subway-car noise of the roller going up, its pins and ball bearings, brings back to me with a painful stuttering strangeness my mother in her last days. Sad decent woman, who every morning during the housebound months she was dying of stomach cancer used to raise her bedroom shade so that she could watch me leaving for school. She never failed to wave to me as I climbed on the yellow bus, even when my old man screamed at her to get back in her sickbed.

  The day is brightening. The lawn needs mowing and the doves have gone away. I turn and look back at my son, who’s looking down at his hands.

  “There’s nothing you can’t ask me, Sam.”

  He sits staring at his hands, a small swab of muscle pulsing in his jaw.

  “Do you dream about him?”

  “Yes.”

  “His family?”

  “All of them,” I say.

  “Then what? What do you do then?”

  “What I can. I get up and go to work.”

  He looks up at me. “Do you hate yourself?”

  My mouth is dry. Carefully, I sit on the edge of his bed.

  “Some days. Other days are better.”

  He nods as if he understands, which makes me sadder than anything he could have said.

  He is my son. He’s within reach now. Soon, I think, I will try to touch him, but not just yet.

  RUTH

  SHE STANDS AT THE KITCHEN SINK finishing last night’s dishes, her back to the windows that look out over the front yard. It was a point of contention with the house when they bought it all those years ago: how it seemed ungenerous, and maybe even cruel, to deprive the one person who was to spend a good portion of her life cooking meals and washing up for the family of a reasonably pretty view while she worked. After months of grudging, Dwight gave in and said that as soon as they had the money they’d redesign the kitchen, turn the sink around, make it however she wanted. The money eventually came, but, despite numerous promises, the new kitchen never materialized. She watched Dwight build himself a fancy workroom in the basement and buy loads of junior sports equipment for Sam, who wasn’t yet even three feet tall. She saw the Newmans next door do a gut renovation, complete with portable wine cellar and the latest German appliances. Which was okay; envy wasn’t her particular sin. It was just that some days, living in the “country,” as they called it, she missed nature the way she missed her mother. One eventually grew tired of brown backsplash tiles palimpsested with 1990s marinara sauce. She wanted to be able to look up one day—simply raise her head—and see that the world was larger and more inviting than her house kept telling her it was.

  The last pot done, she sets it on the dish rack and turns off the water.

  She hears it then, behind her and outside: what she has not heard here, at home, in a very long time. It takes her a few moments to understand.

  Norris had no gift for it. He didn’t like having objects thrown at him. The only ball he ever related to was tiny and never moved unless he himself decided to strike it.

  She turns and looks out the window at the lawn.

  She sees the white baseball, hard-looking in the morning light, speeding through the clear air toward her son.

  She sees her son, as calmly as if he’s considering an itch under his chin, tip his glove like a casual salute and envelop the ball, make it disappear. He doesn’t even glance at it; he knows it’s there. He reaches down—a magician now—and plucks his trusted rabbit back into the light; he grips it and unlimbers himself and hurls the object back whence it came.

  She sees the ball speeding backward in time.

  She sees his father, standing on the other side of the lawn, catch it without struggle or regret.

  PENNY

  STIRRING A POT of miso soup Wednesday evening, she notices, to the right of the stove, the corner of a yellow scrap of paper poking out from underneath the blender. She pulls at it with her fingernail, and a Post-it emerges. Written there, in Ali’s cramped print, are the words “Dwight called.”

  The message is stained with some sort of cooking oil and decorated with juvenile doodles in purple ink; it is not even close to fresh.

  There is nothing left on the answering machine but this morning’s automated message from GEICO, informing Penny that her quarterly car-insurance premium is coming due, and suggesting online payment as the most convenient and secure method. Whatever Dwight had to say to her has been erased by her daughter.

  She slams her hand into the machine, so hard that the thing flips over twice, and the small plastic hatch to the battery compartment pops off. She stares at this minor wreckage as at another’s handiwork. She thinks of marching to her daughter’s room and forcibly extracting her face from the screen of her desires and demanding to know exactly, exactly, the message that was left by a man who may, or may not, be asking for some kind of comfort.

  Reaching for her purse on the counter, she shouts to Ali that she’s going out.

  There is no response.

  • • •

  A light shines from above Dwight’s front door, reaching to the small patch of grass; a precautionary measure in his absence, it would seem, meant to deter criminals. An example of grim psychological conditioning, Penny speculates to herself, or maybe just good practical sense.

  And sitting in her car parked on Hacienda Street, reading his house as though it’s a poem in disguise, Penny attempts now, in desperate earnest, to take a hard look at her own psychological conditioning, such as it has been. The glittering false premise of her many years of adult training: the insistent sifting for patterns and symbols that can be broken down into constituent theories, to be coolly sorted and weighed for meaning in the clinical laboratories of the mind.

  To somehow find a wa
y, his way, to throw away all that. To call it what it is. To be able to say, tonight, simply because she needs it to be so, that maybe this light shining in the darkness is just that—a light in the darkness—and enough to live by.

  SAM

  HE EXCUSES HIMSELF precipitously from dinner. His parents are sitting on either side of him, one at each end of the table, and when he stands and picks up his plate of half-eaten food both sets of eyes, for their own reasons, grow unnerved and meaningful: You’re going to leave us here, together? You must be kidding.…

  Outside, in fast-lowering dusk, he walks the front yard. It is two days since he’s been off the property.

  You reach a stage where you don’t want to be seen anymore, by anyone.…

  Above the trees, in its rightful place, the evening star is an all-seeing eye hammered into the world’s bruise.

  And under his feet now, in the corner of the yard, a good-sized rectangle of lawn—about ten feet by five feet—shows a persistent degradation of growth: a worn green carpet striated with streaks of brown dirt.

  On this area over countless years his stepfather spread thousands of dollars’ worth of fertilizer and specialized lawn products. For it turned out to be beyond Norris’s imagination to accept that there are some places whose troubled history cannot be cured by tonics and potions and other people’s seed. His grass-growing failure he took personally—it was almost funny—never understanding how the problem was never his to begin with.

  A jungle gym had been here once, put together by Sam’s true father. Sam retains blurred, fragmented memories of playing on its tilted swing and rickety slide, under sunshine that may or may not have existed.